He closed his eyes against the memories that I could tell were painful. “I could have killed you. I still see my hands wrapped around your throat, and I can't wrap my head around how I could have not known it was you.” He opened his eyes to study his hands on the table. I slid my hands over his to encourage him to hold on to me. He turned them palms up and linked his fingers with mine. “I still can’t fathom how I could have hurt you, Lily. I was horrified. I still am.” He closed his eyes again and let go of my hands, running them through his hair. “At that time, and for a long time afterward, I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I love you more than anything in the world. I had to protect you.” He opened his eyes and looked directly into mine. “But I loved you so much that I knew if I saw you again, I would not have had the strength to end it. I knew you would’ve wanted to help me, and I couldn’t take that chance. I would have given in to anything you wanted if I saw you. So, I was a coward, and I didn’t explain. Please believe that I thought I was protecting you, that I would die to protect you. I died inside every day I spent without you,” he finished.
“I shouldn’t have climbed into the hospital bed with you. You didn’t expect to find anyone there.” I refused to lethim take all the responsibility for what had happened. While on patrol, his unit fell under heavy fire. Luke took a lot of shrapnel and almost bled out. After Jed got the call, he, my mother, and I flew to Germany to be with Luke in the hospital. He hadn’t expected to find me next to him when he woke up and he attacked me in his sleep.
“That’s no excuse. I had to make sure you were safe,” he insisted.
“So you just left? How was that better than talking to me? I was alone and scared and in love with you. You broke my heart.”
“I hurt you. Who knows what else I might have been capable of?” he argued.
He had it all wrong. I had forgiven him for attacking me the moment it happened. Yes, he had hurt me physically. But by leaving, he’d destroyed me. This huge misunderstanding of what really hurt me left me feeling incredulous. Did he even have a clue what he did to me by leaving was a million times worse?
“I tried to get to you when you were still in the hospital, and you had me escorted out—crying and humiliated—every single time. So, yeah, youhurtme. We had always been there for each other. Then, suddenly, you weren’t there anymore.” I looked away from him. I couldn’t sit there and see the anguish in his eyes anymore. I stood up to pace.
“Iwasprotecting you.From me. Lily, will you look at me?”
I stopped pacing and turned to him.
“I woke up in the hospital, and my hands were wrapped around your throat. Your mom was screaming at me to let go, your face was turning purple, and Jed was pulling me off you. I had no idea where I was, or how you even got there. I went to sleep in a desert and woke up in a hospital, and I was killing you.You. You are what I love most in this entire world, and I almost killed you. I wanted to be with you more than anything I have ever wanted in my whole life, and I keptmyself away from you to protect you. That is how much I love you.”
I began to see where he was coming from. I’d understood it on a rational level before, but the pain he’d caused me had clouded my judgment, preventing me from fully appreciating his perspective. My heart broke a little bit more when the pain started to fade away and I got a glimpse of how he must have felt when he’d thought he had no choice but to keep himself from me.
“But you were having a nightmare. It wasn’t your fault,” I whispered.
“I thought I was losing my mind. I couldn’t trust myself around you. It was too much of a risk. I didn’t know I had PTSD. I didn’t know about flashback nightmares or any of that. I hurt you. I almost strangled you to death.That’swhat I knew. That was all I could think about. How could I have done that? I thought about the future, us married, me killing you in my sleep, killing our kids in a dream. Blood and death. I couldn’t get away...” Tears filled his eyes, and he wiped them away.
I stood in front of him and grabbed his hands again. “Stop it, please, Luke.” I couldn’t stop the tears streaming down my face. “There is nothing to forgive. But if you need to hear me say the words, I forgive you. I forgive you.”
“You forgive me for that morning. Do you forgive me for leaving you?” he asked softly.
“I understand it better now. But I still wish you had let me help you.”
“Help me? How? I was terrified of hurting you again. You are so small, Lily. We’re lucky that your mom and Jed were there, that they heard what was going on and stopped it. If we had been alone back then, you would be dead. I would have killed you. And, God, I would have killed Dylan too. You were pregnant.”
We both paused as the horror of that possibility dawned on us.
I wiped away my tears. “I’m still not ready to?—”
“You’re not ready to trust me,” he interrupted.
I shook my head. “That’s not it. I trust you with my life. With Dylan’s life. Calla, too. But I’m not ready to trust you with my heart yet. Can you understand that?”
“Can I have a chance to earn that back, Lily? Can I take you out to dinner? Next Friday?”
A startled laugh burst out of me. “Like a date? You’re asking me out?” It seemed funny for him to ask me out. We had been through so much, and a date was such a simple thing.
“Yeah. Maybe we could start over.” He smiled.
“Like, start over in the middle.” I smiled back.
“Something like that.” He cupped my cheek and wiped away a stray tear with his thumb. “Everything I’ve ever done is for you,” he murmured.
“Oh, Luke,” I breathed, and without even thinking about it, my body swayed toward his, my arms reached up for him, and like he always used to do, he swept me up and held me close, wrapping me up in his warmth.
He whispered into my neck, his beard tickling my skin. “I’ve missed you so much. I thought about you every day.”
I pulled my head back to see his face. “I missed you too. I tried not to think about you, but I couldn’t stop. I could never stop wondering what you were doing. I want you to read the letters. For a while, I wrote to you whenever I thought about you, so there are a lot.”
Tears sparkled in his eyes as he looked at me. “I want to read them. I want to know about everything I missed.”
